Travels With Gregory: Assembling the Big Easy Go Fleet

A little over a decade ago in Scottsdale, Arizona, Greg Thurnher was a fifteen year-old high school junior and he needed wheels. Young for his grade, Thurnher was just about the last kid without a driver's license. But this enterprising teenager and aspiring engineer found a solution in a city junkyard: It was a broken-down, rusted golf cart.

Thurnher's souped-up golf cart ready for its 1,700 mile trip.

With money he had saved working as a pool boy, Thurnher forked over fifty dollars for the golf cart and got to work on making it road-ready. He took the motor out of his parents' lawnmower and fastened it to the bottom of the cart with wooden blocks. He rigged up a push-start ignition and soon enough the thing was running. Sort of.

It didn't have brakes, so Thurnher often had to make crash-stops or jump out of the runaway cart. But he had wheels. The motorheads in the school parking lot waxing their Trans Ams and Mustangs may have scoffed at him, but no matter, Thurnher had wheels. He made entrances at high school parties rolling out of control over flower beds and white picket fences. Wheels.

Thurnher constantly tooled around with the golf cart, eventually adding some go-cart parts and brakes, learning the basics of mechanics and engineering along the way. When it came time to write his dreaded college application essay for his top choice, Tulane University's School of Engineering, Thurnher wrote about his golf cart project. Unsurprisingly, he was admitted and came to New Orleans to start school in the Fall of 1998.

Two years later, Thurnher - now a mechanical engineering major - dusted off the golf cart and towed his old wheels to New Orleans, hoping to resurrect it with his newfound engineering know-how. It became a mainstay in Tulane's engineering lab as Thurnher upgraded his chariot. Increasingly bigger, louder engines. Functional transmissions. Dependable brakes. The cart had come a long way from that sun-drenched junkyard in Scottsdale.

By his senior year, Thurnher's golf cart was more of a "Golf Car," equipped with a two-cylinder sixteen horsepower motor, a horn, and varyingly appalling day-glo paint jobs that changed with the seasons. It became a fixture at parties around campus, and every Mardi Gras Thurnher would load it up with friends and ride the parade route along St. Charles Avenue.

The answer presented itself oasis-like on the curb of an Uptown New Orleans street: a limousine on blocks with a "For Sale" sign in the window. Thurnher snatched up the limo and went to work on it. Once it was up and running, the 1993 Lincoln Town Car stretch limo joined the "Golf Car" in Thurnher's motorcade of mayhem. Both could often be seen packed with Tulane kids on the way to Audubon Park, trailing a Mardi Gras parade or shuttling between The Boot, Ms. Mae's and F&M's in the wee hours of the morning.

The seed of what would become Operation Big Easy Go had been planted.

Tomorrow, when the Big Easy Go fleet hits the road from Baja Sharkeez in Los Angeles, the Golf Car and limo won't much resemble the junk-jobs Thurnher began with. The limo is fresh from a professional tune-up and Thurnher has painted menacing-looking purple, green and gold flames down its sides and a Tulane University crest on the hood; he's equipped it with wireless internet so it can serve as Big Easy Go's mobile communications center, he's even installed a beer tap and a television. The Golf Car has been broken down to its nuts and bolts and rebuilt with precision as an EZ-GO model cart, fitted with shiny new rims and deep-tread tires, given a purple-green-gold paint job and affixed with an "Undersized Load" sticker for good measure. It will travel at speeds up to twenty-one miles an hour as we make our way from Los Angeles to New Orleans.

Operation Big Easy Go is a cross-country whistle-stop tour promoting New Orleans tourism and recovery across the Southwest. 2007 Tulane MBA graduate Gregory Thurnher is leading the group, driving a golf cart from Los Angeles to New Orleans. French Quarter resident Andrew Travers is accompanying Thurnher on his journey and writing this weblog from the road.

Tomorrow: "The Seeds of Whimsy Come to Flower," how this strange idea spawned from Greg Thurnher's six-week tour of duty as Entergy's Katrina first responder in New Orleans
PLUS: The Big Easy Go crew assembles in Los Angeles and hits the road